The Filth of Suicide
by Deena
Summary: Ken is a young man who dreams of suicidal deaths. Ran a broken man who sees murder. In a scarlet-soaked world the two meet and walk a path towards their own destiny, torn between death, duty and love. *Gore, Sexual Themes, R/K*
1. Chapter I

The Filth of Suicide

~*~Chapter I~*~

High above the city of Tokyo, in a polished office room on the twenty-third floor of an enormous glass sky scraper, a young man lay beside a scribbling elderly lady. The nib of the pen scritching upon notepad paper, coupled with the young man's hesitant voice, were the only sounds that slid throughout the silent room. Floods of sunlight filtered in past the heavy drapery and picked out the red from the young man's fine brown hair. Every wrinkle and faded spot upon the woman's face was laid bare in the warm sunshine. Her incisive eyes were filled with patronizing sympathy as she watched her patient.  

"What else do you see?"

"Scarlet." A carefully blank face stared up at the coffered ceiling tiles. "A world gone entirely scarlet."

"What do you think that means?"

"It doesn't mean anything. It just is. I don't question it. I accept it because it's a part of this world."

"It's a part of your world?"

"Not my world," the brown-haired teenager corrected. "Our world. This is reality. This is now. I see _now_. I'm not crazy."

"No one is calling you crazy Ken," the lady soothed automatically. "Tell me about this now that you see."

Hidaka Ken fisted his hands. He knew what she thought. She thought he was living in his head. She didn't believe him. He didn't want to speak  to her anymore but he made himself do it. He had _promised_. "The scarlet is blood. It's thick and makes puddles on the floor. It drips down the walls and I know it's fresh. Sometimes I see bits of hair or pieces of skin in it. I see broken bodies. Sometimes their eyes are open and they're like cloudy marbles. Sometimes they're covered in their own blood. Their clothes are stained. I can feel their pain, the pain they would have felt before they died. It still lingers in the rooms. It slides into my skin and fills my head. I scream and I wake up screaming."

She wrote quickly. "What exactly happened to these people?"

"They committed suicide."

"All of them?"

He nodded. "And then I see them on TV or read about them in the newspapers. Their names stand out and I know."

"I see."

"You don't believe me."

She chose not to answer that. "Do you see only bodies or do you also see how they did it?"

"At first I saw only corpses but last night that changed. I saw two different men. One was pale with hair the colour of blood. The other was a tall policeman."

"What did they do?

Brown eyes clenched shut. "The red-haired man took a knife from his kitchen drawer and slit his wrists. His blood was dark against his white skin. He was tired and in so much pain. I could feel it. It radiated from him, like heat from a fire. I only felt a fraction of what he felt and it was so intense. I couldn't bear it and I woke up. I was shaking and my own wrists were hurting. I didn't want to go back to sleep but somehow I did. Then I saw the tall policeman  and he shot himself. He got dressed in his police uniform and then drank almost a whole bottle of whisky. His hands were shaking as he took out his gun. Tears came out of his eyes and he pulled the trigger. His skull splattered all over the back wall. Skin and blood smeared on the floor tiles. No one would ever see his tears. His dog came in and licked his dead hand and started barking. The dog was hungry and the policeman was gone."

The woman glanced at him, her face impassive. "And you read about these two men in the newspaper today?"

"Not the first one. I couldn't find him. Just the policeman. His name was  Hibachi Shiro."

The woman inhaled abruptly and her mottled fingers began to quiver.

~*~*~*~*~

Less than two blocks away, inside a meticulous office full of neatly stacked files and gleaming black technology, a scarlet-haired man sat before the half-white Tokyo Chief of Homicide Investigation, Bradley Crawford. Light fractured upon the steely glasses of the older man as he clinically analysed the pale figure before him. Glimpses of gauze peered out from beneath black sleeves. The flesh below was raw, scarred.

"I don't want this anymore." Fujimiya Ran's voice was nearly inaudible. Icy fingers tugged down black sleeves.

"It doesn't work that way." Crawford's voice, in sharp contrast, was edged with severity. "What you want is of no consequence. You don't stop seeing things  just because it's too much for your mind. This is something of a gift or a curse. Call it what you like but it won't change the facts. Every minute you're alone and every night you sleep, you'll see and you'll dream and it _will_ be real. There is no escape."

"But I..." Ran trailed off, ashamed. He was weak before this strong, strict man.  

"You what?"

"I..." His wrists ached. "I just want peace."

_To find peace from death...in death._

Crawford narrowed his eyes. "Where were you two weeks ago?" 

Ran flinched. "You know where." 

"I want to hear you say it." Crawford's face was hard, cold.

Plum-colored eyes shut. "In an asylum."

"An _insane_ asylum," Crawford heartlessly clarified. "Admitted by your own parents."

_We can't keep watching you hurt yourself_...

"Yes." 

"They couldn't take care of you. They were scared of you. They hated you for what you tried to do, again and again."

"Yes."

"And if I hadn't taken you from that asylum, hadn't risked my own career to _illegally_ release you then you would still be there, sitting alone with your dreams and rotting."

_A room like a soft cage, alone and silent and cold. Always cold_..._where I watch myself die_...

"Yes." 

"I don't give a fuck what you feel or what you want," Crawford bit out, allowing fury to mar his vision for the first time. "Because you are _mine_. I own you and you work for me. I only need you as far as my job is concerned but you Ran, you need me for your _life_. You would do well to remember that." He gestured in the direction of bound wrists. "If there are anymore of these incidents then I _will_ send you back . Of that you can be certain."

Ran raised his head and met the older man's dark gaze. _In this sorrow I remain ._"I understand," he whispered. Waves of humiliation swept over him. His failures was so glaring. "I apologize."

"Good." Crawford yanked out a small, silver tape recorder and turned it on. "Tell me what you dreamed this morning."

"I saw..." 

_...a world gone entirely scarlet_ .

Ran blinked. Those words were new words and he didn't know where they could have come from. They felt external, spilling into his mind with an airy whisper. He thought about those words that felt  odd as he began to speak. He spoke woodenly as he kept his mind occupied. "I saw the small man again. I saw his face and I saw his house. He had a new little girl with him. He liked her fear. He liked her skin. I saw him torture her for a long time and he called her bad names. Then he strangled her with her own skipping rope. He raped her corpse. He cut her braids off and kept them in his basement. He likes hair. He has hair from all the little girls. I saw his bed. There was a uniform on it. A grey cleaning uniform. I saw his pay check sticking out of the uniform's front pocket. He's a janitor at the school where the little girl used to go. I know his face."

Ran would have kept talking  but Crawford snapping the recorder off made him blink. Slides of strident memories tried to get into his mind, tried to get back into the front but he pushed them from him as hard as he was able. His head split into a pain that was encompassing. His vision wavered and he saw how his skin had ruptured last night, splashing scarlet all over the place.

_Bleed these sins away_.

Crawford opened his desk drawer and removed an envelope stuffed with money. "Your work is done for today."

Ran took the envelope . His wrists throbbed, itching in madness. He wanted to see them again. He wanted to touch the skinned scars. He wanted to discard all the memories of aggressors and screaming victims. The people were different with different names and faces but the eyes were always the same. The scenarios were always the same. 

_As I am always the same. Alive. In discord. Alone with scarred wrists._

He stuffed the money into his coat pocket. "I need to be home."

"You remember my words." Crawford's mouth thinned. "I will be watching you."

Ran nodded and left the office, his eyes dying piece by piece.

Crawford still for a few moments , his mind working methodically before he opened the line to his secretary. "Eriko? Get me Kudou on the line." 

~*~*~*~*~

"Well?" Kudou Yohji looked up from his laptop where he'd been organizing notes on his latest investigation. "How'd it go?"

"Stupid," Ken muttered, hanging up his coat. "I can't go back there."

"Why not?" Yohji demanded. "You need someone to talk to. This shit's getting out of hand."

"The policeman I saw in my dream last night was the shrink's nephew." Ken struggled against hyperventilation. "She pretty much flipped the lid when she realized what I was saying. It was horrible. She told me she never wanted to see me again. She was crying."

"Shits." Yohji lit a smoke, shaking his head. "Well whatever, we can't do anything about that. I'll find you someone new as soon-"

"I'm not going to anyone new," Ken snapped, his breathing laboured. He gulped in air. Shivers racing up the length of his spine. "I'm can't do this! I can't talk about everything I see and feel to someone who thinks I'm crazy. It's bad enough coming to you every night. It hurts too much." 

"So you'd rather do this alone?"

"I'd rather not do this at all!" Ken dropped down into the nearest armchair and pressed clammy fingers to his temples. His head was suddenly throbbing. "I _hate_ these dreams. Why do I keep having them? They don't serve any purpose!"

"I don't know why you're the one who has to witness all this stuff ," Yohji answered. "But I believe that everything happens for a reason."

"Oh well as long as it's happening for a reason," Ken mocked bitterly. The pain in his mind intensified. "Then all these years of seeing the same shit every night will be worth it."

"Ken it's not-" 

"_Don't_," he snarled, his eyes blazing. "Don't patronize me. You don't see what I see and you don't feel what I feel and you'll ever understand what I go through!"

Yohji exhaled a mouthful of smoke. "I understand that I want to help you."

"Well you can't! As long as I sleep, I dream and as long as I dream, I see suicidal deaths and whether it's fate or not I'll never be able to help any of those people!"

"You want a chance to use what you see to help someone." Yohji leaned back against the couch and studied him. 

Hundreds of corpses, bent and bloody, imploded behind his eyes. Waves of pains, churning and cloying. He loathed those bodies for making him witness it. He loathed himself for not being able to do anything. 

_To find peace from death...in death._

Words filtered through the agony inside his head. They were unknown words, as though he had not thought them. He rubbed damp fingers against his khakis. "Yes."

"I got a phone call from the Chief of Homicide," Yohji told him, inhaling a deep choke of tobacco. "He's got an informant who's something of a ward to him. The informant is depressed, suicidal and crazy. He needs to be protected from himself."

Ken shook his head slightly. His thoughts were wavering. "You want me to be a babysitter?"

"He dreams, just like you do." 

Without warning, Ken's head erupted in a shower of anguish. He bit his lip hard, his sight blurring. He heard himself speak as though from far away. "What?" 

"He dreams of killers, night after night," Yohji said softly. "That's why he's considered such a valuable source . He catches murderers because he sees things that no one else can."

He swallowed and it hurt. "Y-you're serious?"

"Do you I look like I'm lying?" 

Ken blinked hard and his mind clenched at the tiny action.  That he could meet someone who knew, who understood... "When? Where?"

"Now if you want. You have to go down to the station and meet with the Homicide Investigator first."

"I just..." The brunette was tongue-tied, his brain in a fog. He couldn't distinguish between pain and astonishment. "I just want to see him."

Yohji smiled and ground out his cigarette. "Come on, I'll give you a lift."

The ride to the police station was silent. Ken's mind twisted and gnawed like a living organism. Words that weren't his own raced past broken images. He _Alone with scarred wrists_ was nothing more than an extension of the grief that bled within. He didn't know where he began and where his waning sanity ended. There was no purpose in what he saw. He was a spectator, unseen and empty, witness to pain most horrid.

"Here."

Ken could hear Yohji's voice and knew that the blond man was sitting beside him  but he couldn't see him at all. There was a girl in Yohji's place, sleeping serenely with pills pushing through her slowing veins. A bloated man with purple skin and empty  eye sockets lay tangled in a fishing net, water and a grey fish seeping from past fat, bruised lips. Cadavers as far as he could see. Flesh-caked ropes and gore-licked bullets. Faces and bone shattered, drooling upon floors and walls and beds and kitchens and bathrooms. Throats slit, wrists slit, hearts gauged, brains sprayed. So many limbs dripping, so many grotesque faces. Flesh to fluid, blood to chunks of gore. Dreams shattered. Endless anguish. Even still there were imprints of fear upon rotting appendages.

"The guy's name is Bradley Crawford, Chief of Homicide Investigation," came Yohji's voice, slicing through the smear of stacked suicides. "You'll find him on the fourth floor."

Ken felt himself nod. His hand reached out, past slimy, dangling legs and opened the car door. There was wind on his face, rustling through his hair and wrenching at a flowered skirt, a stained sleeve, matted curls. He stepped forward, his feet rippling through puddles of thick scarlet. Something pink and fleshy squished beneath him, warm juice _Bleed these sins away_ squirting onto his pants. The overwhelming stench of rancid flesh clung to his skin, to his very aura.

It was hard to walk. He moved upon membrane and liquid and before him came the view of a bustling police station. His surroundings split as though in two. There was talking and ringing phones and swearing offenders. He saw many policemen milling about and still another world wavered against his skull; a world of heaped carcasses and searing sorrow. Dizziness swept over him, mingling with the gnashing ache in his mind. His head pulsated, like a heart nestled inside his cranium. 

_Where I watch myself die_...

The forth floor was a maze of long corridors and closed, half-glass doors. Grappling at the painted walls to keep from falling, Ken struggled against raging blackness. These sorts of spells were frequent but it wouldn't do to have one in the middle of the police station. Not when he was to find one _fucked in the head_ like himself. If there was someone he could help, someone who could make it all worthwhile than he _needed_ to see him. Nothing else made any difference.

Clenching his teeth, he continued down the hallway. Bradley Crawford's office was at the very end. The words written upon the glass read 'Chief of Homicide Investigation'. He could read them, despite being weak. He was weak, always weak. What he saw in the depths of his sleep made him so.

_You see what you want to see._

But that wasn't true. No one would want to be witness to continued self-inflicted deaths. It was horrifying. It was his curse.

A few meters away, Crawford's office door opened. Sunlight splashed out, causing him to cringe. Ken wiped at stinging eyes and felt himself leave behind his tainted world. A figure was illuminated in the doorway for an instant before the door slid shut.

A pale man trudged forward, his gaze trained to the floor. His hair was the colour of dark blood.

Ken's heart smashed into his throat. He froze in his tracks, right in the center of the corridor.

The pale man would have eyes the colour of violets. Ken knew without seeing them. He also knew that beneath those sleeves there were _dead_ damaged wrists. He knew because he had watched the man slice both his wrists with a knife from his kitchen drawer. And now he wasn't-

"Dead...?"

The man looked up and their eyes locked.

To find peace... 

Blood crashed into his head, purging away every memory and every emotion. His ears rang with flooding torrents. He could hear nothing, not even his own thoughts. There were just those dying eyes and vibrant hair.

"A world gone entirely scarlet," the man whispered. He pressed one ashen finger to the arch of his eyebrow. Confusion spilled onto that empty face and then he was hurrying, his face carefully blank. Past him, beyond him and gone.

Ken stood there, his heart gushing. One of his dreams had appeared before him. A dream that hadn't died.


	2. Chapter II

~*~Chapter II~*~

_Dead_.

That's what the brown-haired boy standing in the hallway had said to him. _Dead_ but said as a question. That was odd, to ask _Dead_. Why would a complete stranger ask something like that to him? It didn't make any sense. Didn't that boy know what asking _Dead_ meant? Ran knew well what it meant. Dead meant long gone smiles and shadows in the night and hatred made solid. Dead meant _forever_ and _never_ _again_.

Dead was the only  way to find peace. Dead was all he wanted from life and wasn't that a bit funny,  to want from life its exact antithesis?

His wrists burned beneath the stained gauze bindings. 

Ran didn't know why someone would say such a peculiar thing to him and he didn't like it. It kept echoing in his mind like a _bleeding child _persistent memory. There had been something about that boy, something off. Something ominous. Ran knew that surely as he knew his name but he didn't know what it was. Not exactly. When his eyes had first fallen upon that boy, strange words had come into him, into his head. 

_A world gone entirely scarlet_...__

He had heard himself speak those words out loud. He knew those words weren't his own. That made his head feel a bit scared. How could he have words in his head that weren't his own? Was it like seeing the smearing blood of another? Those images weren't his own. These words weren't his own. They had just been clinging inside his mind, like the beginning of a homicide that would not let him be. Whose words were they? The boy's? A killer's? But they didn't _feel_ cruel, just sad. What could it mean?

_I watch myself die.___

Thin fingers tugged at itchy wrappings. They traced the pattern of horizontal scars hidden below. Despite promises and debts and his own waning rationality, Ran wanted it. He wanted death so desperately that without it he was _alone with scarred wrists_ incomplete, broken. It was past bearing, that he should see murders beyond grisly behind his eyes. Rotting within his mind. Night after night, to live without peace. Screams and arcing blood ruptured at his heels. His steps were stained. Inside he was so filthy. Was this really what he deserved?

He could never save them, those countless, defiled corpses once veiled in innocence. Catching killers wasn't enough, not when every tear and every shriek and every pain still lingered inside his soul.  He was saturated with memories horrible and they were nothing he could expunge. He couldn't live with these realities any longer.

Ran stepped out of the police station and stood blinking in the bright afternoon sunlight. It was nosy, with people and cars rushing rapidly rushing by. A group of loud high school boys walked past, throwing him odd looks. He didn't mind, not so much. Just as long as no one _Dead _talked to him. He didn't like talking to people. Sometimes they got into his head and sometimes he simply couldn't bear their purity. Because when they would die, their thoughts would be horrible. Their faces would blacken and their terror was unspeakable.

Unbearable.

He knew these things much too well.

Ran walked away, his legs moving as though of their own accord. The crowds of people and the busy streets vanished, leaving him to walk upon cracked asphalt. Stained asphalt. A boy with messy  hair and freckles on his nose was dumped in his path, his little jean overalls torn and dripping. He stepped over the boy's small body, even as his head turned to look back from over his shoulder. There was a gooey plastic robot clutched in limp fingers. A little boy who he would never forget.

His way was littered, jammed. Some eyes were open and they watched him pass with expressions blank. Others were closed or gone and could not see the one who had no right to see. His legs moved, bidding him forward, even as he wanted to stop and to touch. Empty faces he recognized. Screams that still echoed in his head. He could remember them all; knew who had suffered in what kind of pain. Every image  was branded against the imprints of his being and from it there was no release. 

It was impossible for him to separate himself from the things laid bare inside his mind.

As Ran strode on, his fingers continued to work against his bound wrists, scratching and chafing. There was wetness and he knew it was crimson in colour. It bothered him, grating in the manner of an itch. The need to cast off the flimsy bandages and slide his finger into the red mess below overwhelmed him. That wasn't so wrong and that wasn't breaking his promise at all. He just wanted to see his own fluid and suffer as so many around him were suffering. It was no more then he deserved. Afterall, it was his skin and his injury. He could do as he wished.

Tearing away stained stripes, Ran let them fall onto the sodden pavement. His skin was white, splashed with drips of red and soggy pink. It was familiar, this type of damage. It was what he craved ...but he had promised. He couldn't break his promise, not to the one who had wanted him when even his own parents hadn't. He owed Crawford. Crawford was watching him. Crawford could see things like this.

And so Ran couldn't  seek out what he wanted, not for now.

He walked on, his wrist splashing. 

~*~*~*~*~

A perky secretary ushered Ken into Bradley Crawford's office. Ken entered on shaky legs, in a state of stunned shock. His stomach rippled with sharp jerks, as though he'd just been hit. Inside his mind there was nothing but blaring static. Through it all, only one figure was made lucid. 

_Damaged wrists...the one with hair the colour of blood...___

Yes. 

One figure with eyes so dead. What else was there to know? It was the truth, despite all appearances. The truth that was a pale man who had echoed his words. The truth was words running through his head that weren't his own. The truth was an instant where he and the _dead_ pale man had shared something that surpassed anything he'd ever felt with another. The truth was a bloody image and it terrified him because...

..._that man had committed suicide.___

Ken pressed clammy fingers to the pulsating skin of his temple.

"Hidaka Ken?"

Blinking, Ken saw before him a foreign-looking man with dark hair and glasses come into focus. He forced himself to cast aside rioting thoughts and bring his mind into clarity. "Yes," he croaked, sitting down onto one of the hard visitor's chairs. 

Crawford didn't concern himself with polite preliminaries. "What exactly did Kudou tell you?" he demanded.

Ken swallowed painfully, his stomach still writhing. "A suicidal informant of yours needs protection."

"And?"

Ken hesitated for an instant. "He dreams about...strange things."

"Things similar to your own dreams," Crawford expounded, watching him shrewdly.

Ken bit back a startled noise of shock. "You know about that?"

"I make it my business to know." Crawford pushed up his glasses, a cynical expression marking his grave features. "Why do you suppose I contacted Kudou of all people?"

"But-" Frowning, Ken tried to assimilate what Crawford was saying to him. He had known and lived with Yohji for the past three years. He couldn't imagine the detective telling anyone about his dreams. "This isn't something Yohji would tell you. I know he wouldn't."

"He didn't tell me anything," Crawford replied, slightly irritated. "He only confirmed what I already knew. You aren't the only one who sees things."

"I guess not." Ken twisted at his numb fingers, chills scribbling up the length of his spine. That others might see as he saw hadn't occurred to him. "What is it that you see?"

"Glimpses of the future, of things to be." Hard eyes locked with uneasy ones. "I see you with my ward, binding his wounds."

The words slipped from him, of their own volition. "Wrist wounds?" 

Crawford assessed him with narrowed eyes. "You've seen him."

_Alone with scarred wrists._

"He's not the one who-" 

_Died..._

Opening a drawer, Crawford removed a slim manila folder and tossed it onto his desk. "This is all you need to know."

As Ken reached across the polished surface for the folder, his hand began to shake with an obvious violence. Embarrassment coursed through him. He was horribly exposed before this grim, perceptive man. It wasn't a feeling he was used to or liked at all. Sensing his face burn, Ken hastily yanked the folder open. 

Pale features adorned with a pair of empty purple eyes stared up at him from a glossy photo.

Somehow, he couldn't be surprised. 

~*~*~*~*~

Abnormally long walls made of glinting steel distorted the reflection of two figures, one standing and one seated, working at the row of black technology that dominated the room's farthest edge. 

A soft click was heard as a colourless image appeared upon the computer screen. "This is the one he pulled from the asylum two weeks ago."

The standing figure, a tall German man by the chosen name of Schuldich, leaned a bit closer to the screen. The picture was of a young, scarlet-haired man with hollow eyes staring off in the distance.

Another click and a new picture, this one in colour, emerged on the monitor. "This is the man we want."

Schuldich was surprised to see that the dark-haired man wasn't Japanese. "This is the Homicide Chief? A foreigner?"

"Bradley Crawford is half Japanese." Acute dislike washed over fine features. "He came from New York to live with his father, the previous Chief of Police, some years ago. He entered the force upon connections alone. This is unacceptable. Such an honourable position cannot be held by the likes of an American bastard. We want all his secrets exposed and his reputation disgraced."

Schuldich smirked, flipping his bangs from his face. "By the time I'm through with this guy, he'll be as fucked as up as his ward."

Full lips curved. "This pleases us." A few files and a series of small disks were gathered and handed to the German. "Above all, we desire answers. Why should Crawford take on an unstable ward of no relation to him? How has he been suddenly solving such complex, deadbeat murder cases? These things you must seek first. We want any and all information you are able to find on both he and his ward. You are to report to me each night at midnight. The balance of your price shall be paid upon completion. Take whatever measures you choose to fulfil your assignment. We will cover your tracks. All avenues are open to you. Do whatever you must in order to complete this assignment, understand?" 

"Perfectly," he drawled out, pleased. 

A nod of satisfaction. "Then we shall speak this evening."

~*~*~*~*~

Ken stood before the brick building that was Fujimiya Ran's apartment, hurriedly drowning a cup of scalding coffee he'd purchased from a nearby restaurant. The meeting with Crawford had left his mind in such a fragile state of turmoil that even his vision had been affected. Leaving the police station had been a conscious chore, with everything in sight blurring in triple wobbling lines. His head was filled with Ran, filled with that ashen face and those haunted eyes. There was nothing else. He was to protect one who should have died. A man who saw just as he saw. 

Ken's tongue stung as he finished the remainder of his hot drink. His head felt solid and he supposed that was something. Still, anxieties coiled within the pit of his stomach. He didn't know what he had to fear and he didn't fear easily but fear was there all the same. It wouldn't be easy to separate the image of Ran attempting suicide from everything else. That crimson-soaked picture lingered in the front of his mind. Guarding Ran was a task that could easily fracture his fraying rationality. As it was, his sanity hung upon gossamer webs, each unravelling a little bit more as new gore continued to tarnish his dreams.

But putting everything else aside, the bottom truth was that something strung between him and this Fujimiya Ran. That was what petrified him the most. They both slept in scarlet worlds, he had born witness to Ran's death, Ran's words were inside his mind and his own words came from Ran. Whether it was the dreams or the death no one was meant to see Ken didn't know, but it bound both of them together.

Tossing the empty styrofoam cup into a nearby trash bin, Ken inhaled sharply and entered the building. The interior was dim, contrasting harshly with the bright sunshine outside. His eyes adjusted as he waited for the elevator. There was a gloomy feel to the place. The carpet and walls were dark and the few paintings which adorned the lobby were morbid in nature. The picture which hung between the two elevator doors depicted a skeletal hand covered in oozing boils and flaking skin. Three gaunt, black rats were chewing at the diseased flesh with sharp teeth. Ken turned his head as his stomach churned.

The elevator was empty, as was the eighth floor corridor. It was unnerving. The sensation of people watching him from behind shut doors overwhelmed him. He walked quickly, his steps echoing about the silent hallways. Apartment 818 was at the very end of the hallway. He stared at the closed door, his heart throttling frantically.

_Bleed these sins away_...

He saw inside his mind Ran sinking to the kitchen floor, blooding slipping from shorn skin. That very scene was etched inside his mind, there to stay. It would not be repeated. 

Ken knocked on the door and waited. There was no answer. Perhaps he was..._damaged_...? Ken yanked out the copy key Crawford had given him and unlocked the door. The scent of chemicals, turpentine possibly, drifted out over him. The apartment was dark and uncomfortably warm. He closed the door behind him and cautiously crept down the hallway and into the living room. The room was meticulously tidy and bore no signs of any type of personality. Everything was perfect in its place. There were no personal belongings or clutter to indicate what sort of person lived there. 

Ken moved into the next room which happened to be the kitchen. The shock of seeing _this_ room, the room from his dreams, nearly undid him. He gasped, stumbling against the doorframe. The room was an exact reflection of what ate at his mindflesh. His brain exploded in pain. The drawer with a knife inside, the tiled floor, apples on the table, everything was frozen. The only difference was Ran. He wasn't crumpled upon the floor but rather sitting on it in front of the fridge, leaning his tilted head against the white, plastic door. His long legs were bent up to his chest, his open hands resting on his knees. He was watching his raw wrists bleed. They weren't bleeding as heavily as last night but there was enough to drip crimson blobs all over the floor around him.

Ran looked up at him with those stark eyes. They were as bright as his spilling blood. "You're in my house," he muttered, a frown creasing pallid features. "And your words are in my head." 

Ken took a step forward. His legs were shaking. He had to forcible smother down the rising pain inside his head. "You promised," he stated firmly, his tone much stronger then he actually felt. "You promised Crawford that you wouldn't hurt yourself again." 

Ran's eyes widened. "I only just took the-" He stopped, his face darkening. "How do you know what I promised Crawford?"

"He told me." Ken grabbed the roll of gauze that still sat upon the counter and knelt down beside the redhead. "I have to bind your wrists." He caught hold of one pale, leaking wrist.

His very reality imploded.

Colours that actually _pulsated_ ribboned around them. The room swirled, bursts of air rushing into their bodies. Ken could see nothing but smoking violet eyes, mirrored with what his own eyes held. His blood pumped and his heart beat in sync with the one before him. A hundred murders squirmed into his mind so that he could see what Ran saw. His own memories fled, gathering into the mind of the bleeding redhead. He could feel himself both lose and grow.

For in that instant, as their skin scorched against the other, they existed as one.

And then it was severed as Ran's wrist falling from limp fingers. 

"What did you do to me?" Ran's voice was a breathless whisper. He pressed at his forehead, blinking hard.

Ken couldn't speak. All he knew that the excruciating pain inside his head was gone. With shaking fingers, he managed to pick up the roll of gauze. He bound Ran's wrists as best he could, his skin tingling in shock as it touched the other. The astonishment was still there, if ever it would leave. Blood pounded into his head so hard that he could barely hear. He could feel Ran's heartbeat from where he knelt.

"What's your name?" Ran whispered, also trembling in his hands.

He didn't think he could speak but at the last moment it splashed out. "Ken." 

"You dream like I dream."

"Yeah." Ken let go of Ran's hands. His fingers were literally buzzing, as though electricity was surging through them. "That's why I had to come here. I had to see you."

They stared at each other, the air around them crackling with awareness.

_In this sorrow I remain...___

...bound to you. 


End file.
